Veronica Mars

Kristen Bell plays Veronica, a thirty-ish year-old woman who is about to sign on with a big law firm in New York City when she's unexpectedly pulled back to her hometown of Neptune, California, where an old love interest has been accused of murder. Veronica, it turns out, used to work for her father, a private eye, and she apparently was pretty good at solving mysteries. This modern-day Nancy Drew flick is kind of thin--it feels like an extended episode of a TV show more than a movie--but then again, it's more of a valentine to the many fans of the show, which was canceled in 2007 after three years.

The initiated should be pleased with seeing many of the recurring characters from the show reunited. There were some confusing moments for non-fans, but overall, Veronica Mars is pleasing fluff, bolstered by the always plucky Kristen Bell. Jason Dohring plays Logan, her ex-boyfriend who went on to marry another girl from their high school days. Said girl is also the murder victim, a troubled pop star whose downward spiral (and turbulent marriage) was fodder for the tabloids. It all feels very much like something that could only happen in Hollywood. Where else would you rekindle your relationship with your high school sweetheart while trying to prove that he didn't murder his pop star wife, with whom you also went to school? (All while avoiding persistent phone calls from a charming would-be fiance and a prestigious law firm.)

There are some amusing supporting performances, such as Ryan Hansen as Dick, another chum from high school, and Gaby Hoffman (where has she been?) as an obsessed fan who dresses like the murdered singer. Jamie Lee Curtis makes a brief appearance as Veronica's would-be employer, Chris Lowell plays Veronica's current boyfriend, Enrico Colantoni plays her dad, and Krysten Ritter plays Gia, another high school friend. With Tina Majorino, Francis Capra, Percy Draggs, Jerry O'Connell, Ken Marino, and James Franco as himself. Written by director Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero.

True Lies

I really don't like giving James Cameron any credit, and I certainly wouldn't do it if I didn't have to. But True Lies (1994) is a good example of how to do action movies right. It's completely mindless, but, except for a tacked on second ending that feels like overkill, it's a fun movie that draws you into its chaotic, mindless action sequences with a fairly fresh take on the whole spies vs. terrorists plot. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, who works for a U.S. counter-terrorism operation. His mousy wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), thinks he's a boring computer salesman, and because the excitement in their marriage is long gone, she's become involved with a con artist (Bill Paxton) whom she thinks is a spy himself.

True Lies enabled Jamie Lee Curtis to show another side of herself: she performs a striptease act in front of a man (her husband, although his face is concealed in darkness so she doesn't know it's him). What's impressive is how good she is at it, and how funny it is when she loses her balance but picks herself right back up. Curtis has always had spunk, and while this scene is a little creepy (especially if it's supposed to be some kind of career marker for her), she also gets to be a heroine in this movie. And her naturally funny personality comes through beautifully too.

What works in True Lies are the comic performances of Curtis and Tom Arnold, who plays Harry's loud-mouthed right-hand-man Mike. (He has all the best lines.) And even Arnold is enjoyable here. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously, so why should he. He's at ease, playing a guy he's played seemingly a hundred times. When he asks Tia Carrere to Tango--and then later when he Tangos with his wife--he's totally unconcerned with all the serious things going on in the movie, a signal to us that we're at least in front of a film that wants to show us a good time. Who can ask for anything more?

With Art Malik, Eliza Dushku, Grant Heslov, and Charlton Heston. Written by the director. 141 min. ★★★

Halloween

John Carpenter's films between Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Christine (1983) were supreme examples of how atmosphere can make a movie, and how it can compensate for other less successful attributes. Halloween (1978) is the apex of Carpenter's early career (and ultimately, of all time), full of cinematographer Dean Cundey's ominous tracking shots, and lots of creepy blue lighting, plus Carpenter's chilling--if redundant--score, reminiscent of Mike Oldfield's eerie Exorcist tune.

The story of Halloween is about as simplistic as it gets: a maniac escapes from a mental institute and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, which was the scene of his first crime 15 years earlier when he stabbed his teenage sister to death. For reasons unknown, he goes after three teenage girls: Jamie Lee Curtis, making her film debut, is the most resourceful among them, and P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis play her friends, who are too busy with their boyfriends to be aware of the masked killer lurking around the corner.

A lot of Halloween is delayed gratification: Carpenter keeps you waiting for the bogeyman to strike, but often times he doesn't. His patience is almost miraculous, except for his horrible intentions. But why is he so patient? And why does he continually let Laurie (Curtis) out of his grasp? Perhaps he's playing a game with her, but because he's supposed to represent evil incarnate, the script--by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill--doesn't try to explain him, or his motivations.

Donald Pleasence classes things up as the obsessive psychiatrist Dr. Loomis, who tried to rehabilitate the child murderer for 15 years, obviously unsuccessfully. He follows the killer--named Michael Myers--to Haddonfield, convinced something bad is going to happen. Pleasence was well-known for playing villains and heels (such as Blofeld in the Bond picture You Only Live Twice). Halloween revived and redirected his career, inaugurating him as the prototype for all the old farts who permeated slasher films in the 1980s. (He's just the slasher era's Van Helsing, really. Wiser than the stupid teenagers, and cunning enough to rival the killer.)

While Halloween isn't a perfect picture, it still ranks as the best of its ilk (with the original Black Christmas just behind it). I can't think of a better "slasher" film, although it's hard to really put it in the same category as the movies it inspired (such as Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream). It's not all that violent, and there's almost no blood. Carpenter tries to rely on suspense to make you jump. And while he's not as sophisticated as he's been credited, Carpenter achieves the quality of a Hollywood nightmare: something controlled and very deliberate, but enjoyable when you're able to watch it at work, hitting all the right marks. It's the ultimate popcorn horror flick.

With Charles Cyphers, Nick Castle as The Shape (although it's not his face you see when Laurie briefly unmasks him, but Tony Moran's), Kyle Richards, and Brian Andrews. Followed by seven (!) sequels. Avoid the wretched remake.

A Fish Called Wanda

A Fish Called Wanda is a throwback to screwball comedies, directed by Charles Crichton, a veteran of English comedies from the 40s and 50s, and co-written by Crichton and Monty Python's John Cleese. It's a heist movie with Cleese as an English barrister who becomes romantically involved with a sexy American con artist named Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and her live-wire "brother" Otto (Kevin Kline). They're in cahoots with a bank robber, George (Tom Georgeson), whom Cleese is defending. (They turned him in to the police with hopes of making off with the loot, unaware that George had spirited it away beforehand.)

John Cleese successfully convinces us that he's capable of being a romantic lead as the married, dulled-out lawyer Archie Leach, and Jamie Lee Curtis does some of her best work as Wanda. She's playful and smart, and a born performer (or a ham is more like it). Loony comedy suits her talent and her looks well, and this intermingling of British and American styles of humor seems to bring out the best in her, as it does for Cleese. But it's Kevin Kline as Otto who really breaks out of the mold, delivering an off-the-wall performance as a macho moron who reads Nietzsche but hasn't a clue what it means. Otto can't stand being insulted, particularly when it comes to his "intelligence," and he makes up for his insecurities in the typical male fashion: with violent, aggressive fervor. He's hysterical, and even won an Academy Award, which rarely happens for comedic performances (or comedic anything for that matter.)

As a movie, A Fish Called Wanda sags in parts, but it makes up for its slow spots and its indulgences by being a deliriously bawdy British-American spectacle, one that's perhaps trying too hard to one-up American comedies in terms of its proud vulgarity. (It's always more clever than a truly vulgar movie, though.) You spend a lot of the time giggling at its crude humor, when you're not laughing at the genuinely fun and earnest comic performances. And there are some particularly brilliant scenes, like the one where Archie's wife (Maria Aitken) unexpectedly returns home when Archie and Wanda are kissing on the sofa. Otto, always the jealous type and never subtle, is also inside, watching, and he tries to save Archie from being found out, displaying his inability to make up a believable story to Archie's wife, who sees through him. Kline is fast with the insults, though, and he completely throws himself into his character's manic personality. The energy in some of the scenes of this movie is wonderful stuff, a real novelty in the 80s, where so many comedies seemed too carefully planned out. The best scenes in Wanda are remarkably off-the-cuff, and yet they don't seem sloppy or unstructured. They have the panache and style of good writing and the zing of good improvisation.

Michael Palin, another Monty Python regular, co-stars as Ken, one of the accomplices in the bank robbery scheme that quickly becomes subordinate to the romantic story and this film's garish insanity. The cast reunited for 1996's Fierce Creatures, which wasn't as tight or as clever as Wanda. 1988.

The Fog

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) may be ludicrous as a thriller, but as an exercise in creepiness, it's wonderful fun. Carpenter and co-conspirator Debra Hill had just come off the phenomenal success of their low-budget thriller Halloween (1978), so by comparison The Fog seemed tame to audiences who were by now growing accustomed to more shocks and splatter, and less patient with an atmospheric, deliberately paced ghost story.

The plot involves a cadre of vengeful spirits bent on doling out vengeance (and murky weather) to a small California town on its 100th anniversary. The founding fathers of the community apparently betrayed a group of lepers, leading them to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. Now the lepers have come back to celebrate.

Carpenter relies too much on plodding slasher-film death sequences as the film progresses, but overall it's still one of his best mood-pieces. You find yourself enjoying all the little stories being weaved together throughout the film.

Carpenter imitates two masters in The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The movie feels like a noirish, supernatural re-imagining of The Birds (the setting reminds you of that film's coastal locale, Bodega Bay, and the fog serves as a stand-in for the birds, creating a similar feeling of apocalyptic doom). Simultaneously, Carpenter invests his scenes with a Hawks-esque film noir feel. That feel is best developed in the scenes of the main character, a local deejay named Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau). Stevie sits solitarily perched in a lighthouse, from which she runs a radio station that plays old jazz standards. From the lighthouse, she has a bird's-eye-view of the whole town. As she observes the fog and begins linking it to a series of deaths, Stevie becomes a voice of warning to the community. Barbeau is perfectly cast as the heroine: she's gutsy and smart, and carries the film well, especially since she's hardly on screen with any other actors.

The Fog deflates a little at the end. The whole movie is a big buildup, layering the scary atmosphere with relish, but there's not a whole lot beneath the atmosphere. Evidently, there were attempts to punch things up by adding a little more violence to the movie after the first cut was finished, but the movie's problem isn't lack of violence but lack of a genuinely scary threat. Fog almost always adds to a horror film, but when the things in the fog are only moderately scary, fog ceases to be effective.

Most of the cast members compensate for the movie's lack of follow-through. Janet Leigh makes a good impression as a local busybody who's spearheading the town's centennial anniversary gala. Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter in real life) returns to Carpenter-land, this time not quite as helpless as Laurie Strode was in Halloween. However, she's not memorable in this movie. Her part feels unnecessary to the story, and because there are stronger female characters around her, she fails to stand out. She's even overshadowed by fellow Halloween co-star Nancy Loomis, who plays Leigh's droll assistant in this. The two have an endearingly irritated-with-each-other relationship. With Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook as an alcoholic priest, Charles Cyphers, and John Houseman, in a creepy bit at the beginning, giving us the town's dark secret in perfect ghost-story fashion.

It might be thinking too deeply to call The Fog an indictment of colonialism, but it certainly points out the irony of celebrating people who murdered and stole to get what they wanted.

You Again

What do you get when you combine Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Betty White, and Kristin Bell with a bad movie? A bad movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Betty White, and Kristin Bell.

You know you're in for it when the lead character (Bell) is overshadowed by the other characters, none of whom are well-defined beyond some shallow caricature. Bell, who had pimples and glasses in high school and became the class scapegoat, has turned her life around nearly ten years later as a successful public relations analyst who's just been handed a big promotion. But her brother (James Wolk), a schmaltzy pastiche of a 50's goody goody and an 80's yuppie, has become engaged to the girl (Odette Yustman) who terrorized her during her ugly duckling phase. Soon the rest of the plot unravels before our eyes: Bell's mom (Curtis) was the one-time BFF and later the arch nemesis of Yustman's Aunt Mona (Weaver). Some kind of catfight showdown is surely on.

The plot is promising, but the script by Moe Jelline is ill-conceived: it's a bad mix of some wedding weekend gone awry and some high school nostalgia piece. If the actions of these characters were even a little believable or made even a little sense, we might be more inclined to forgive the scattershot laughter and the limp jokes. The presence of talent does not guarantee that the talent will deliver the movie from incompetence, and to see such a waste here (how do you get Cloris Leachman and then only show her for 30 seconds?) is truly disheartening. ★